Melanie Phillip's:
I have just viewed the film Obsession, the documentary about radical Islams war on the west, extracts from which were shown on Fox News in the US at the weekend and which you can read about on this website. It should be made compulsory viewing for every politician and pundit who clings to the misguided belief that all we face is terrorism rooted in various grievances around the world. It is the single most powerful and terrifying public exposition of the fact that a global Islamic jihad is now being waged from Bali to Istanbul, from Chechnya to Madrid, from Morocco to Manhattan, from Thailand to Bloomsbury  and that the world that is under attack is deeply in denial about what it is facing. More than that, this film shows in graphic and undeniable detail that this jihad is a direct descendant of Nazism. It has clear historical links  it was to the Nazi-supporting Mufti of Jerusalem in 1941 that Hitler vouchsafed that he intended first and foremost a war of extermination against world Jewry; it has the same agenda of genocide of the Jews and world domination, and the same techniques (and almost identical motifs and visual imagery) of whipping up a frenzy of murderous rage against America and the Jews through repeated hysterical claims of their purported and infernal intention to destroy the Islamic world, conveyed through truly diabolical imagery straight out of the handbooks of medieval and Nazi blood-lust.

Some of the footage in this film leaves you speechless. The Shatat series on al Manar TV, for example, transmitted into millions of Muslim homes around the world, which purports to show a Jew kidnapping a Christian child and slitting his throat in order to use the blood to make Passover matzahs. This of course was the medieval blood libel against the Jews which caused unspeakable savagery to be meted out against them on the basis of a monstrous lie; and here is this same abominable lie, animated for TV and thus doubtless convincing millions of Muslims of the diabolical nature of the Jews. Just as horrifying are the children seen being indoctrinated to hate Jews and Americans, to kill them and to die. A three year old girl, asked why she doesnt like the Jews, answers because they are apes and pigs (a common depiction) as was said by our God in the Koran. The images of these young children, with their sweet and innocent faces, being programmed to hate and to kill are unspeakable. As a former member of the Hitler Youth observes, the techniques and iconography are identical to those used by the Nazis  because they were learned from the Nazis.

The similarities to the Nazis are indeed overwhelming. The screaming demagogues, the wholesale indoctrination of children into the cult of hatred and death, the repeated use of diabolical propaganda, the aims of genocide and global domination  and the fact that although such aims are constantly reiterated, although the deeds that follow plumb unimaginable depths of barbarity, although the lies are as transparent as they are systematic, the watching world still refuses to acknowledge that this is indeed a global war that is being waged. Just as in the thirties, it takes refuge in fantasies and excuses and refuses to act; worse than in the thirties, it elevates Islamic fascists to downtrodden martyrs and heroes. There are Muslims in this film who speak the truth plainly and unmistakably: the Palestinian correspondent for the Jerusalem Post Khaled abu Toameh, who says that the Islamic world has hijacked his religion and has declared holy war upon the west in order to destroy its civilisation and Christianity; or Nonie Darwish, born and brought up in Gaza, who relates how as a child she was taught jihad, to wage holy war and conquer the world for Islam, and how her classmates would cry with the emotion of declaring themselves ready to die as martyrs for the cause. And Nonie Darwish is a middle-aged woman. The widespread belief in the west that jihadism, suicide bombers and the rest of it are merely responses to recent actions by Israel or America, or to oppression by Israeli occupiers, is demonstrably ridiculous.

This is a film about fanaticism. It does not make easy viewing. It destroys the fiction that Islamic terror is the product of grievances about specific conflicts. It demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is instead the product of fanatical, hysterical, paranoid, medieval hatred, bigotry and power-mania. What it shows above all is that we are up against an ideology which turns millions towards madness and savagery  but we are totally failing to combat that ideology. Indeed, we dont even recognise it for what it is. This film goes a long way towards opening our eyes.http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1379

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